Mary Ann Leff
Berkeley, CA
Mary Ann Leff, educated at Carnegie Mellon University, lives and paints in Berkeley, CA
MessageStudying and making art since childhood, I majored in painting and sculpture at Carnegie-Mellon University and have been a working artist, living in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since.
My primary love affair has always been with color--being able to surround myself with it, to explore and indulge in it, gives me an almost visceral sense of pleasure. Recurring themes of interest for me in my life and in my work have been the creation of sensuous, highly textured and color-saturated surfaces, and the exploration of what lies beneath the surface—what might be hinted at, what is hidden, unknown, unconscious, lost, or not yet emerged.
I have been strongly influenced by the abstract expressionists, but also resonate strongly with Monet, Bonard, Matisse, Dubuffet, Diebenkorn and Stella--obviously because of my intense love of color. But I am also attracted to several of them because of the layering and juxtaposing of apparently contradictory and contrasting pieces in their work—which is very much like my own struggle to integrate all the disparate pieces of my life into a whole. I work to balance the spontaneous and intuitive movements of my brush with the thoughtfulness and care, judgments and decisions that go into creating a painting.
I keep reaching out to discover and explore new media. This exploration itself is a search to make sense of and to make something new from this very uncertain time.
The past year has been extraordinary, filled with grief, anger, hopelessness and hopefulness, and gratitude. A fantasy of escape is represented in my work by the frequently recurring kayak shape (a decidedly female shape). It references the feeling of freedom, as well as the exhilarating sense of danger and exploration I experience both ocean kayaking--and working in my studio.
copyright mary ann leff